Passionate about IP! Since June 2003 the IPKat weblog has covered copyright, patent, trade mark, info-tech and privacy/confidentiality issues from a mainly UK and European perspective. The team is David Brophy, Merpel, Jeremy Phillips, Eleonora Rosati, Nicola Searle, Darren Smyth, Annsley Merelle Ward and Neil J. Wilkof. You're welcome to read, post comments and participate in our community. You can email the Kats here

For the half-year to 31 December 2015, the IPKat's regular team is supplemented by contributions from guest bloggers Jani Ihalainen, Nikos Prentoulis and Mark Schweizer.

Birgit Clark is on Sabbatical till the end of the year

Regular round-ups of the previous week's blogposts are kindly compiled by Alberto Bellan.

Thursday, 13 December 2012

As this Kat learnt from her
own copy of seminal book A to Z of Style,
legendary Christian Dior once said: "In town you cannot be dressed
without gloves anymore than you can be dressed without a hat".

Transferring this basic rule to
the equally fashionable realm of copyright, it seems that nowadays you cannot
go around speaking of its possible reforms without mentioning that these have to be
evidence-based (if you want to know what evidence means, you can learn it here and here)

Not a long time has passed since the publication of Ian Hargreaves's report entitled Digital Opportunity. As UK-based readers will remember,the need for an evidence-based approach to IP (in particular
copyright) reforms was advocated therein.

A month ago it was the turn of
a report prepared by the Republican Study Committee (RSC, a caucus
consisting of more than 170 members of the Republican Party in the US House of
Representatives) entitled Three Myths about Copyright Law and Where to
Start to Fix it (see 1709 Blog post here). Although the memo was recalled by the group's executive
director one day after its release and the member of the staff who wrote it no longer works for RSC, similarly
to the Hargreaves’s Report the document lamented that "most legislative discussions on [copyright],
particularly during the extension of the copyright term, are not premised upon
what is in the public good or what will promote the most productivity and
innovation".

Now Fight for the Future ("A nonprofit working to expand the internet's
power for good") has launched a campaign entitled Copyright is Broken: Fix It!. This
initiative, which enjoys the support of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), intends to urge US
Congress to engage in "a
reality-based debate about [US] copyright policy", since current
copyright system "is getting in the
way of free speech, art, and innovation". The text of the campaign
reads as follows:

"Instead of
promoting free expression and innovation, [copyright] is impeding them. That
hurts artists, activists, entrepreneurs, and the general public. I want my Congressperson
to fix copyright now. The Republican Study Committee’s memo on copyright reform
pointed out fundamental problems with copyright law -- problems that stand in
the way of innovation and free expression. I am heartened to see that
Republicans and Democrats are realizing that copyright policy needs to be
consistent with their core values -- and I want my Congressperson to help lead
the charge."

Merpel agrees that discussion about how to reform copyright is indeed needed. But while such debates heat
up, what has been happening out there? There are two very recent pieces of news
which IPKat readers may be interested in.

Firstly, it seems that
copyright owners have been relying widely on the cooperation of internet
service providers (ISPs) to combat online infringements. A couple of days ago
Google reported on the progress of its
copyright removal feature (data on removal requests can be viewed here) saying that, while the
removal rate between December 2011 and November 2012 was 97.5% of all URLs
specified in copyright removal requests, the number of requests has increased
widely. When Google launched the copyright
removals feature, it received more than 250,000 requests per week. That number
has increased tenfold in just six months to more than 2.5 million requests per
week.

Secondly, judicial guidance
from the US Supreme Court has been increasingly sought to clarify both the
boundaries and consequences of copyright infringements. While at the end of
October this year the Court heard arguments in a case concerning the scope of
the first sale doctrine, a couple of days ago file-sharer Jammie Thomas-Rassetaskedthe Supreme
Court to review a jury’s conclusion that she pay $222,000 for downloading and
sharing two dozen
songson the now-defunct
file-sharing service Kazaa. In particular, thequestion presented to the Supreme
Court reads as follows: "Is there
any constitutional limit to the statutory damages that can be imposed for
downloading music online?"

What seems certain is that
2013 is going to be a very interesting year for copyright, both in the US and
Europe (see1709 Blog postshere,here andhere).

2) EFF is just one of many groups sponsored by technology companies, who lobby on behalf of the technology industry to weaken copyright. Google sponsors many groups who help advance its agenda.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19181172

The desire to weaken copyright even further takes various forms, such as widening exemptions, and weakening the ability of rightsholders to enforce infringement. Weaker, or 'reformed' copyright benefits the technology industry by lowering costs.

3) Matters of social responsibility are raised by this. We are entitled to ask who benefits from this, and what are the future social and economic costs where value is accrued by technology distributors.

4) Fight for the Future is the latest vehicle for a long-standing campaign against the music industry.

See http://thetrichordist.com/tag/fight-for-the-future/

Tiffiniy Cheng is a serial activist who has held a grudge against record labels since 2003, when she helped form Downhill Battle. (To read more about the chilling tactics used by the group, read this series of posts). Next came the Participatory Culture Foundation (whose board includes Boing Boing’s Cory Doctorow), a group whose biggest accomplishments seems to be getting money from the Mozilla Foundation.

Her latest venture is Fight for the Future, a group whose hyperbolic headlines involving Justin Bieber — and a whopping $300,000 grant from the Media Democracy Fund (the organization, which has previously awarded grants to the New America Foundation and Public Knowledge, awarded less than $4 million total in grants for the previous five years) — helped it lead the charge against SOPA last winter. (According to this article, the key meeting between Fight for the Future and the other advocacy groups involved occurred November 9, 2011, at Mozilla headquarters.)

It would be helpful, before cliches such as 'evidence based', to remind us who is paying for the evidence to be manufactured - and what are the costs.

"1) The 'Three Myths' paper was prepared by a 24-year old member member of the RSC"

Why mention his age? Heres why.

Read as: "Another one of those youngsters meddling in things they dont understand"

Your methods are transparent. And the rest of your post is standard industry shilling. There are many people who are very ideologically against the music and film industries, and with damn good reason: because of the evil and strife they have wrought.

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Gama and Pal: is the wet-wipe packaging confusingly similar?

Yesterday morning the IPKat posted this item on an ongoing passing-off action, Gama Healthcare Ltd v Pal International Ltd. in which Gama objected that Pal's wet-wipe packaging would lead people to think it was theirs.

When that Katpost went live, there were no examples of the parties’ packaging to show readers. The Kats have since received images of both, which they reproduce below, and they ask readers, through the medium of the sidebar poll below, if they think that Pal's packaging might be mistaken for Gama’s one.

Pal's packs are sold under the Medipal brand and Gama's are sold as Clinell products.

Caveat: this poll is conducted purely for the amusement of readers of this weblog. It is not mandated by the trial judge or commissioned by either party; it is not based on any methodology and it is not intended to have any evidential value at all.

Wet-wipe packaging: do you think you could pick up a packet of Medipal, thinking it was Clinell?

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